In the coming months STMC is planning to make significant changes to its membership arrangements. For existing members the current system of annual renewals will be discontinued and all existing members will be offered life membership. New members will be asked to pay a one-off joining fee of £25. New members will also be asked to complete and sign a membership application form as at present. After the end of 2013 the Club will no longer maintain its affiliation to the British Mountaineering Council. Members who want to continue receiving the benefits of BMC membership (insurance, discounts, Summit etc) will be able to join BMC as individual members.

Club activities will continue as at present: meets at roughly one per month, local walks, London socials and Xmas meals, and the main means of communication will be the E-News.

At the moment we have not been through this website to reflect these changes, so please be aware that in future the club will operate as described here.

Forthcoming Meets List of the club

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Contributed by Ian Stuart

Meets List for 2017

For any questions about these meets, current members can contact Bookings Secretary via the e-mail address given in the monthly E-News. Non-members please contact the Membership Secretary via the Contacts page of this site). Please follow the guidelines ‘How to Book’ and ‘On the Meet’ in every newsletter and on this Website under News/Special Information/Meet Booking Information. In particular, could you please bring appropriate maps on every meet you attend. For each meet I have listed the maps that are most likely to be useful, but the list isn’t exhaustive, sometimes people will visit an area covered by an adjacent map, and it’s up to each member to have the correct maps for his/her chosen route.

Prospective Members - please see further information at the bottom of this page.....

Mar 3 – 10 2018: Scotland Winter Week, area of Spean Bridge.

Please contact Julie for details. Please note the usual constraints apply to this week regarding appropriate equipment and experience for winter conditions in the Scottish Highlands.

Mar 16 – 18 2018: Yorkshire Dales, Airton Quaker Hostel.

Small bunkhouse in the Dales village of Airton. On the Pennine Way a few miles south of Malham, one of the best known areas of the Dales. Excellent walking, a chance to see Malham Cove, Goredale Scar.

April 20 – 22: Exmoor, Camping.

Plan to use a campsite just outside Porlock, at the eastern end of Exmoor, quite near Dunkery Beacon. The site used to be a regular STMC venue but we don’t seem to have been there for several years.

As you know, the Committee and other club volunteers try to find a different area each year for the spring meet. Some of this year's attendees suggested Plockton as a possible venue for 2018. However, after considerable web searches on both private and holiday home rentals we were unable to find suitable properties close together. In 2013 we rented Woodlands at Shiel Bridge, Kintail, which proved to be most satisfactory, and we have decided to book the house again for 2018, from 19th to 26th May. There are five bedrooms, two doubles and three twins sleeping eight in total, and there are four bathrooms. We are aware that May 2018 is a considerable way off, but we needed to book early to secure a good house option. Please look out for an announcement calling for deposits later in the year to secure your place.

Don Whillans Hut is a unique building, superbly located under the buttresses and boulders of this historic climbing and walking area. This seems to be the most popular hut in England!, and needs to be booked a full year in advance; which we have done.

The Scotland Winter Meet is planned for 2 weeks in February, starting on 11th Feb. The plan at the moment is to have a week around Killin/Loch Tay in the Southern Highlands; and a week in the far north around Kylesku, although accommodation isn’t very easy to find that far north so conceivably it might be a bit further south. Which week is Killin and which week is Kylesku might depend on the accommodation availability. Coming for 1 week rather than 2 would certainly be possible, the Killin week might be the easier option for a single week. The general idea is that one should have crampons, ice axe and be competent in their use. Julie will need to arrange accommodation in September so would want to know numbers and sexes of people going so that she knows what size property to be looking for. Transport could also be an issue so if you wish to come perhaps you could also include your thoughts on transportation.

Information for Prospective Members

This information is provided to give people who may be considering joining the Club a summary of STMC’s meets for the next few months. This also gives an idea of the range of the venues that we normally visit; in February we normally have a week of winter mountaineering in Scotland, and we organise a further week in Scotland at the end of May. The Club does not normally arrange overseas trips, but groups of members often get together to arrange trips to the Alps or the Pyrenees.

All meets provide opportunities for walking, whilst in North Wales and the Lakes there will often be a party doing some scrambling. Many areas also provide opportunities for technical climbing, notably the Peak District (on the gritstone edges) and North Wales. But if you’re not interested in climbing don’t worry, climbing-only meets are a rarity and there will virtually always be people on the meet to walk with. The only meet where we impose a restriction on attendance is the Scotland Winter Week, where it would normally be dangerous to go out on the hills unless you are equipped with ice axe and crampons, and have some experience in their use. The winter meets in North Wales and the Lakes sometimes, but by no means always, coincide with serious snow and ice conditions, but there are usually lower routes that you can do if you don’t have ice axe and crampons.

People are expected to be suitably equipped for their chosen routes and the conditions – usually this just means warm clothing, decent waterproofs and boots, plus food and drink – click on Equipment for more info. The only other requirement is that we do expect everyone to have appropriate maps, so that no-one is just totally depending on someone else to do the route finding and map reading.

Each meet has an assigned ‘meet secretary’, whose contact details are provided to members. The meet secretary’s role is to arrange lifts to and from the meet, and access to the accommodation (but not to lead or organise routes in the hill). The procedure for booking onto a meet is simply to contact the meet secretary.